Heidi Terese Vangen.

Hi, I'm Heidi!

I live in a rural community on the outskirts of Bergen, Norway. 

I worked as a freelance translator alongside my day job as a digital archivist for several years until I decided to set up my own translation business and make it my full-time career in 2024. I guess you could call it my midlife crisis, as I turned 40 around the same time.

As a translator I specialize in faith and spirituality, health and wellness, and literature. Though my experience covers a multitude of topics.

I love that I get to immerse myself in a world of words every day and help people and their businesses in the process.

BEING A NEURODIVERGENT TRANSLATOR

Born this way

Being autistic, one could say I was born to be a translator. Before I could even articulate it, I knew I was different and I felt the painful consequences of not fully understanding the people around me.

Later on, as I learned to communicate with words, I experienced how easily misunderstandings occur. I saw how we as human beings are similar yet so very different in how we express ourselves. Even a shared language can be used in a myriad of ways, as a single word can communicate different things to different people. Basically, communication is tricky even without a neurodivergent brain.

Due to these circumstances, I pushed myself to use my intellect to decipher all the layers of communication that I didn't inherently grasp.